On many occasions over the decade that he served as Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin has countered attacks by Western diplomats with a pointed turn of phrase. RT looks at six such moments from Churkin’s distinguished career.

The US envoy to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, received this response from Churkin on August 29, 2008, after he condemned Russia’s “invasion” of Georgia. \

The five-day conflict started when US-backed Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili launched an attack on Russian peacekeepers in the breakaway region on South Ossetia. Russian forces responded by dismantling Georgia’s NATO-trained military, retreating from the country, and recognizing Ossetia’s independence.

This was Churkin’s reply to UK envoy Matthew Rycroft on February 3, 2017, after Rycroft called Russia’s position on Ukraine an “inversion of reality” and seconded new US Ambassador Nikki Haley’s demand for Russia to “return Crimea” to Ukraine.

“The people of Crimea quite clearly expressed their will in a referendum,” Churkin told Haley, pointing out that the US Constitution begins with the phrase, “We, the people.”

Churkin had this tongue-in-cheek retort for then US ambassador Samantha Power, after she spoke of meeting with the members of “Pussy Riot” on February 6, 2014. The self-described punk-rock activists gained notoriety in Russia and fame in the West after three of their members were arrested for a “performance” at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral in 2012.

That is how Churkin commented on Power’s emotional speech about the humanitarian situation in Aleppo, where the US-backed rebels were losing a battle to the Russian-backed Syrian Army, on December 13, 2016.

“Please, remember which country you represent. Please, remember the track record of your country,” Churkin told her.

That is how Churkin reacted to a report about the situation in Aleppo by Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Stephen O’Brien, on October 27, 2016.

“Give us one fact, please, or leave this kind of storytelling for the novel you may well write later,” the Russian envoy told O’Brien.

Speaking at the UN General Assembly on May 11, 2016, Churkin called on world leaders to remember the organization’s founding principles.

“One should not seek to expand their sphere of control, as it is happening as result of the unrestrained NATO expansion. One should not strive for military dominance, the way US aims to do by creating the global missile defense system,” he added.

“Instead, we should go back to the origins of sensible political thinking, to the slogan ‘the world is undivided,’ to the understanding that the wish to ensure your own security at the expense of others only undermines security globally.”

The speech by the new US permanent representative to the UN Security Council, Nikki Haley, at a Security Council meeting on 3 February backed up the idea that the new administration policy on Crimea will be followed up. Haley said exactly the same nonsense as Samantha Power before her: «Our Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns control of the peninsula to Ukraine». The White House supported Haley’s statement the same day.

It is interesting that Mrs Haley was speaking about the territory of Crimea rather than the people. I wonder how she seeks the «return» of the Crimean Peninsula to Ukraine – with the people or without them? It’s a pity that this question has remained unanswered yet.

Does Nikki Haley know whether the Crimean people regard themselves as Ukrainians or not?

It is unlikely that the US ambassador to the UN wants to move the people out of Crimea so that she can give the peninsula back to Ukraine.

Especially as she would have to move not only the living, but also the dead, since the ‘Ukrainian’ history of Crimea is very short, around a quarter of a century. It is surprising that the citizen of a country whose constitution begins with the words «We the people of the United States…» is doing everything to avoid a conversation in terms of «We the people of Crimea…»

From the point of view of the people who live on the Crimean Peninsula, Ukraine annexed Crimea in 1991, grossly violating the rules of international law. Crimea became part of independent Ukraine illegally, and repeated attempts by the Crimean people to redress this injustice met with opposition from Kiev.

In order to understand this, Nikki Haley just needs to be made aware of a few facts.

In 1990, the Parliament of the Ukrainian SSR adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty, which hid behind the words «Expressing the will of the people of Ukraine…» and spoke of a new state being established within the existing boundaries of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic based on the Ukrainian nation’s right to self-determination. But did the Ukrainian nation have the right to self-determination in Crimea if the number of Ukrainians on the peninsula made up only 25.8 percent of the population?

The answer is obvious – no, it did not. This was the first step in the annexation of Crimea by the Ukrainian state, which, at that point, was the Ukrainian SSR separate from the Soviet Union.

On 20 January 1991, the first Crimean referendum was held on the restoration of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic as a subject of the USSR and as a party to the Union Treaty. (Between 1921 and 1945, the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.) With a high turnout of 81.37 percent, 93.26 percent of the Crimean population voted in favour of restoring autonomy. On 12 February 1991, the restoration of the Crimean ASSR was confirmed by law: the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR accepted the results of the referendum. The Crimean people were clearly self-determining, and this self-determination differed hugely from the self-determination of the Ukrainian nation.

The Ukrainian SSR 1991 law on establishment of the Crimean Autonomous Republic, signed by the Chair of the Supreme Council of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk

So what did the Ukrainian state do next? On 24 August 1991, the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR, again on the basis of self-determination, declared the independence of Ukraine, arbitrarily identifying the Crimean ASSR as a territory of the newly established state. By doing so, the founders of Ukraine ignored a law requiring a separate referendum to be held in Crimea on the Crimean ASSR’s status within Ukraine. This was done deliberately, since Kiev knew perfectly well that the people of Crimea would never vote in favour of becoming part of Ukraine. At the same time, a huge scam to manipulate history was being prepared: on 1 December 1991, another referendum was held in the whole Ukraine including the Crimean ASSR, known as “the Ukrainian independence referendum”. The results in Crimea and Sevastopol were notably different from those in the mainland Ukraine (most of the Crimeans ignored the plebiscite), but the quorum was reached thanks to non-residents were allowed to vote at the Crimean poll stations. In this underhand way, Ukraine took its second step towards the annexation of Crimea.

A Crimean boy standing for boycott of the Ukrainian elections

The Crimeans did not agree with the Ukrainian sharp cookies, however. From the start of 1992, the number of protests began to increase – the Crimean people were outraged at the deception and demanded secession from Ukraine. Under pressure from the people, the Supreme Council of Crimea adoptedthe Act of State Independence of the Republic of Crimea, approved its own constitution(link in Russian), and passed a resolution to hold a referendum on 2 August 1992. It was another step towards the self-determination of the Russian majority of Crimea was pushing for lawfully and legitimately. The Constitution of Crimea began with the words: «We the people, who make up the multi-ethnic nation of Crimea and are united by centuries-old ties of a common historical fate, are free and equal in dignity and rights…»

By this time, however, Kiev had already gotten a taste for political tricking. The referendum was postponed to a later date (it was held in 1994 in the form of a public opinion poll) and the Constitution of Crimea, under pressure from Kiev, was rewritten dozens of times until the peninsula was tied to Ukraine for good. The first presidential elections took place in Crimea in 1994, but by 1995, both the position of president and the Constitution of Crimea had been abolished. In late 1998, the Ukrainian authorities brought the legislation of the Autonomous Republic of Ukraine completely in line with the legislation of Ukraine. This was the penultimate step in the annexation of Crimea, the final step being to deprive Crimea of its autonomous status by establishing a Crimean region as part of Ukraine.

Over the next decade, Kiev did not dare do this, since any attempt to raise the issue of abolishing Crimean autonomy led to large-scale protests and demands to restore the 1992 Constitution and the statehood of the Republic of Crimea. Creeping Ukrainization was also unsuccessful – moulding Crimea to be more like Ukraine did not work even in light of the 2001 census:

The February (2014) uprising in Kiev was not supported in Crimea, but attempts by Crimeans to oppose it led to tragedy: on the night of 20 and 21 February, buses taking protesting Crimeans home from a chaotic Kiev were stopped by armed nationalists in the small city of Korsun-Shevchenkivskyi. The Crimeans were beaten, tortured, forced to sing the Ukrainian national anthem under threat of death, and made to pick up broken glass from the buses’ windows, which had been smashed with sticks, with their bare hands. This episode was reported in details in Andrei Kondrashov’s 2015 documentary “Crimea: way back home”:

In thereferendum on 16 March 2014, the Crimean people once again confirmed their historical choice, just as the United States once did when they broke away from the British Crown. In the US Declaration of Independence, it says that the Creator endowed people with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Just like Americans, Crimeans also want to live, be free and be happy. That is precisely why they spent decades trying to break away from the Ukrainian dictate, something they finally achived in 2014 when they returned to Russia.

It seems that Nikki Haley, like millions of her fellow Americans, does not know the history of the Crimean people’s struggle against its illegal annexation by Ukraine, which began in 1990 and ended in 2014. Questioning the choice of the Crimean people in 2014 seems to be the reason why the US permanent representative to the UN Security Council is keeping quiet about the Ukrainian annexation of Crimea in the 1990s. After all, no one in the world could doubt the results of the Crimean referendum held on 20 January 1991. If it is a case of the deliberate distortion of facts, however, then the situation looks a lot worse.

If you were to side with the Crimean people, then the history of Crimea’s reunification with Russia becomes simple and understandable. It is enough to know that for each territory, whether that is the US or Crimea, exactly the same words are key: «We the people…»

Unless the U.S. government’s lies about Crimea — the ‘Russia seized Crimea’ narratives — become acknowledged to be lies, war between the U.S. and Russia can only continue to become increasingly likely, because the world is sliding toward World War III based upon these lies, and will therefore inevitably continue that slide until these lies are publicly repudiated by the U.S. government, which is their sole source. The liar on this is clearly the U.S. and not Russia: the U.S. is the entire source for the alleged cause for war between the U.S. and Russia.

The preparations for war between the U.S. and Russia continue naturally apace until the United States publicly acknowledges that Russia had not ‘seized’ Crimea — acknowledges that the cause for all of these war-preparations by the U.S. and its NATO and other allies against Russia is fake, a U.S. lie, and that Russia is purely America’s victim in this entire matter and acting in a 100% defensive way against America’s aggressions in this matter.

Anyone who is closed-minded to the possibility that the U.S. is lying and that Russia is telling the truth about the relationship between the two countries, would therefore be simply wasting time to read here, because the solid documentation that will be provided here will prove that that’s not only a possibility; it is the fact, and those widespread false beliefs will, indeed, be disproven here. Proving that, is the purpose of this article. Therefore, a warning is needed beforehand, for any reader who is closed-minded about that possibility — any such person would be wasting time to read this article. Here it is:

(WARNING: The following article asserts many things that are propagandized almost universally in The West to be false, and in each such instance the documentation of the assertion’s being true is provided in a link, so that any reader who doesn’t already know its truth can easily come to know that he/she had previously been deceived about that particular matter — the reader can come to know this just by clicking onto the link. This article depends upon its links, which are rooted in the most-reliable evidence on the given topic — far more reliable than any of the ‘evidence’ that’s cited by defenders of The West’s position, lies on these matters. The links are provided so that a reader can easily connect to the actual evidence, and decide on one’s own, whom the liars are, and are not. It all depends upon the evidence. Any reader who doesn’t want to know the evidence, would be just wasting time to read here.)

PRESENTATION OF THE CASE

Obama-Trump economic sanctions against Russia are based upon the lies that are to be exposed as lies, in the links here. So too are the NATO movements of U.S. troops and missiles right up to Russia’s very borders — ready to invade Russia — based especially upon the lie of ‘Russian aggression in Crimea’. All of the thrust for WW III is based upon U.S. President Barack Obama’s vicious lie against Russia: his saying that the transfer of Crimea from Ukraine to Russia was not (which it actually was) an example of the U.N.-and-U.S. universally recognized right of self-determination of peoples (such as the U.S. recognizes to apply both in Catalonia and in Scotland, but not in Crimea) but was instead an alleged ‘conquest’ of Crimea by Russia. (As that link there documents, Obama’s allegation that it was ‘Putin’s conquest’ of Crimea is false, and he knew it to be false; he was well informed that the people of Crimea overwhelmingly wanted their land to be restored to Russia, and to be protected by Russia, so as not to be invaded by the Ukrainian government’s troops and weapons, after a bloody U.S. coup by Obama had — less than a month earlier — overthrown the democratically elected President of Ukraine, for whom 75% of Crimeans had voted. Obama’s own agents were behind that coup; they were doing his bidding. The aggressor here is entirely the U.S., not Russia, despite Obama’s lies.)

In other words: the renewal of the Cold War (and an increasingly hot war by the U.S. against Russia’s ally Syria, and elsewhere) this time against Russia (no longer against the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact military alliance, none of which even existed after 1991) is based upon Barack Obama’s refusal to allow democracy for the people of Crimea. The build-up toward WW III is that simple — a vicious U.S. lie, directed against Russia.

And that’s not the only instance where the U.S. government blocks democracy in order to conquer Russia by grabbing Russian-allied nations (first Ukraine, and then, increasingly, Syria). Twice in one day, U.N. Secretary General Ban ki-Moon said that Obama’s demand that Syria’s current President, the Russia-friendly Bashar al-Assad, must be prevented from being even on the ballot in Syria’s next election for President, is unacceptable, and that (as Ban said) «The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people».

Why is the West allowed to dictate to Crimeans, and to Syrians, that they cannot choose their own government?

This is the new, anti-democratic, United States government. This is the reality.

Lawrence J. Korb, who was U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense during 1981-1985, quit the Cold War against Russia when the Soviet Union and its communism and Warsaw Pact all ended in 1991, and he wrote on 26 February 2016, headlining «Don’t Fall for Obama’s $3 Billion Arms Buildup at Russia’s Door». He was on the correct side about this, against the Obama-initiated thrust toward WW III, but he understated the evilness, by saying:

Comments while meeting with Ukraine’s president came after Trump indicated he could end Crimea-related sanctions in return for a nuclear arms reduction deal

Vice-president Joe Biden, on a last foreign trip before leaving office, met Ukraine’s president on Monday and called on the incoming Donald Trump administration to retain Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia.

US intelligence agencies believe Russia sought to covertly influence the US election in Trump’s favour and against the Democratic nominee, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Trump has recently admitted that he believes Russia did orchestrate such hacks, but has nonetheless fuelled a bitter feud with intelligence officials over the issue.

“The international community must continue to stand as one against Russian coercion and aggression,” Biden told reporters, standing alongside Poroshenko, in remarks which did not include reference to Trump by name.

“The Crimea-related sanctions against Russia must remain in place until Russia returns full control to the people of Ukraine.”

Andy Hunder, the head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, said Kiev would have to put much time and resources into dealing with the new US administration.

“On 20 January Ukraine will be waking up to a new reality,” he told Reuters. “There is a concern in Kiev about how the new relationship will develop. It will require building new bridges to the influencers, the gatekeepers and decision-makers.”

Kiev has taken steps to win the good favour of the those calling the shots in the Trump administration. Days after the election in November, Poroshenko’s office started planning an official visit to Washington in early 2017.

A bipartisan group of US senators, including the Republicans JohnMcCain and Marco Rubio, said last week they wanted to slap a wide range of sanctions on Russia over its cyber activities and actions in Ukraine and Syria. A sanctions bill with similar provisions is being written in the House of Representatives.

“Our job is to make sure this attention on Ukraine does not wane,” Ukraine’s ambassador to the US, Valeriy Chaly said on Wednesday.

As Biden left the room on Monday, a journalist asked if he thought the Trump administration would give Ukraine the same priority as he had. Biden gave a thumbs up.

Ukrainian security operatives have abducted two Russian servicemen in Crimea, and are attempting to press criminal charges against them, the Russian military is reporting.

Moscow says they are considering the kidnapping a “flagrant provocation,” and is demanding the immediate release and return of Maksim Odintsov and Aleksander Baranov to Russia.

“We consider such actions by the Ukrainian security bodies against Russian citizens as another flagrant provocation and demand their immediate return to Russia,” a statement by the ministry’s press service said.

The ministry said on Monday that the two soldiers were kidnapped on November 20, and taken across the border to the Nikolayev region of Ukraine with an apparent goal of pressing charges against them. They also expressed concern that authorities may use psychological and physical torture to coerce the two men into falsely confessing to crimes against Ukraine.

Russia’s historical southern region of Crimea rejoined the country after a 2014 referendum. Nearly 97 percent of the region’s population voted for reunification in a referendum.